Brands need mobile apps. It's a simple fact in 2016. Consumers are always on smartphones and tablets. It's the easiest way to reach them, and it's the best method for providing mobile users with excellent, engaging experiences. More importantly, if your company doesn't offer a mobile app, it could hurt your revenue.

"Mobile-product excellence will soon become a predictor of success or failure for every industry," said Will Pate, a mobile strategist writing for The Globe and Mail, and he backed that up with some good evidence:

• Facebook has one of the most downloaded mobile apps, and for good reason, given that its app is one of the most user-friendly. As a result, Pate explained, the company's stock has risen 33% over the past year, with mobile accounting for 80% its revenue.
• Google is experiencing a similar rise in stock performance (32%), thanks to the business's senior vice president of search, Pate asserted.
• On the flip side, Yahoo's mobile apps are of "mixed quality," wrote Pate, and its stock is down 31%.
• Then there's LinkedIn, whose mobile app Pate called "weak" and "buggy," and it's suffering from a stock value drop of 57%.

The message is clear: mobile app quality is an indicator of corporate success. It's because consumers have more opportunities to interact with businesses and buy from them when those customers have branded mobile apps. That extra channel through which businesses can earn revenue can be the biggest differentiator -- even if a shopper can't purchase a product within an app.

You should be asking how you offer a great app at this point. Here's how.

Focus on Building a Five-star Reviewed App

Nancy Hua of Apptimize told MarketingDive that too often, companies try to pull in users rather than create an experience that is worthy of their time. That's a major error. Instead, brands must focus on launching a fantastic app. To ensure you release a five-star reviewed app from Day One, you need to adopt a development strategy that's predicated on frequent mobile app testing.

Leverage the Cloud

You cannot just test, however. You must do so on real mobile devices. In that regard, you should turn to the cloud. As Maribel Lopez of Lopez Research wrote for Forbes, cloud-based app testing solutions provide "functionality and scale." You can test on a wide variety of smartphones and tablets, testing each capability and ensuring that your app works and performs perfectly on whatever consumers are using - and you can test quickly thanks to automation.

Provide Continuous Quality

Launching your app is just the beginning. You need to provide your app's end users with continuous quality, which entails giving them new features and fixing bugs as frequently as possible. Lopez said that the focus should be on what your customers want. Collect feedback and perform mobile app monitoring to identify the biggest problems and correct them.

By following a path to success that many other brands have, you too can improve your bottom line.